Last month I was discovering a lot of users were completely unable to play the game, some of them even had VR-ready modern hardware!
I made the difficult decision to downgrade to Unity's URP pipeline. This means no more volumetric lights, ambient occlusion, and some other fancy effects.
However, this means even integrated, and mobile hardware can suddenly play the game reasonably! It took a while but I think I'll be sticking to URP for a while.
- Casino temporarily removed to make room for the new one (soon).
- Replaced decal system with an "infinite" decal system. Make a huge mess! URP doesn't have a built-in decal solution. I don't actually care about the individual fidelity of each decal, so what I do is re-use the lightmap atlases to map some textures to the world. This allows you to paint the entire world with decals!
- Remade the majority of shaders to work within URP, this required some reduction in interpolators so most shaders should be a fair bit more efficient!
- The switch to URP allows for real-time reflection probes, I render one every 3 seconds and blend to it. Allows for much more accurate reflections (especially during night).
- The player is now completely a Kobold, spawns with random stats just like any other Kobold. Can even get pregnant, have sex, drink potions, and do anything else a Kobold can do. This was a really big systemic change which pretty much broke EVERYTHING. I really rushed to get this patch out by the end of the month, so there's probably a lot of broken things I haven't gotten to yet. Please be patient as I clean it up!
- Penetrators now don't couple immediately on touch if they're not in range of the nearest hole. This means there's no more tripping over them. (This was especially frustrating as a player kobold).
- Temporarily disabled AI for the transition into online multiplayer-capable systems.
- Fixed the math on rotating props you're holding with R, it should make sense from any direction and perspective now. Still needs a bit of smoothing to look nice, but it's very functional at the moment.
- Disabled procedural texture generation, this tech was far too unstable, slow, and made it difficult to test multiplayer. It probably won't come back either, people nowadays don't care about downloading an extra 200mb or so anyway.
Patch notes isn't super long since majority of my time this month was spent switching to URP. Though next month I'm going to have something extremely exciting to show, might have something to do with online multiplayer but no promises!